Why don't we give literature a sporting chance?

Date: February 06 2013

Norman Jorgensen

Sport mad West Australians always seem to come up trumps when it comes to government funding. Prolific, award-winning local author, Norman Jorgensen, believes it’s time we focussed on funding for literature.

It seems I am about as un-Australian as it is possible to be in that I find sport totally tedious and completely irrelevant.

I could not care less which person reaches the end of a swimming pool quicker than the others, or which foreign, overpaid, grunting tennis player can knock a yellow ball back over the net more times than another, and forgive me for being cynical, but what difference does it make if the employees of a private company, as in a football club, are ranked in the top eight.

Next year they probably won't be, but the world will still continue as if nothing had happened, and, hopefully, I will be blissfully unaware, even though sports journalist will do their level best to make sure I pay attention by literally swamping the media with what they see as vitally important.

As an un-Australian, which could well be the greatest insult we pay to each other, I am more worried about how very little we value books and literature here in my homeland.

In 2008, multi-award-winning Australian children’s author Sonya Hartnett, author of Sleeping Dogs, Of a Boy and Thursday’s Child, among many other excellent books for teenagers, was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Award of $1 million, presented by the Swedish King on behalf of the Swedish Government.

In her acceptance speech she said:

“More than that, thank you Sweden for being a nation of such culture that you would fund such a prize as the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. I am an Australian, and, in Australia, books are not valued particularly highly; so I congratulate you for looking, through this prize, into the future, for appreciating the past, and for acknowledging what is so rarely acknowledged: that children’s books help shape children, and thus, in a small but important way, shape the world.”

Hartnett's speech attracted many adverse comments, especially at home, and mostly, I suspect, because it was too close to the truth, being a completely accurate comment as far as I can see, and as the supposed best country on earth, we were mightily ashamed to be shown as complete Philistines by a foreign government of a much smaller country.

Tragically, the comment is all too true. Compared to sport, in Australia literature funding is a joke. Sport funding eclipses literature's beyond all measures imaginable. The Australian Institute of Sport spent $324 million last year, while the Australian Institute of Literature ... well, it doesn't even exist.

As an Australian, or un-Australian, as proud as I could possibly be of my family's long heritage in Australia, I too find this reverence and fascination of what young people do with their muscles, instead of their intellects, total madness.

In fact, I think it is a national embarrassment. The great societies of the past are famous for their architecture and their cultural achievements in literature, painting and music, not for the fact that Athens United defeated Sparta City, 3-1, or Caesar's First Eleven drew with the Brutus A Team due to rain washing out the Colosseum Test match of 51BC.

Western Australia's very own Oscar-winning children's book creator, Shaun Tan, also received theprestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2011, honouring his contribution to international children's literature.

He was the first West Australian ever to do so, but the announcement of the huge honour passed by with less fanfare than if Nic Naitanui had pulled a hamstring that same day.

According to its website, the Australian Sports Commission has a new AIS European Training Centre (ETC) in Varese, Italy.

Having an elite sporting base overseas reduces the financial, physical and emotional effects of the demanding travel itinerary previously experienced by Australian athletes. Sports such as rowing have significantly reduced transportation costs as they can now store boats and equipment permanently at the ETC.

I nearly choked on my Coco Pops reading that. Seriously? No, I mean SERIOUSLY. A training camp in Italy, so the superfit poor darlings won’t get tired travelling to Europe?

Think about it for a minute. Also, think of that next time it is taking you forever to save for an overseas holiday in Italy because a lot of your income is disappearing in taxes to fund the ASC or the grossly overpaid Olympic Committee.

What we have here in WA is, not million dollar institutes but Writing WA, The Literature Centre at Fremantle, a few writers’ centres and Fremantle Press. They receive some government funding, but it is in the thousands, not the millions of dollars which go to sports bodies.

We also have the WA Branch of the Children’s Book Council of Australia. And thank God for them too. The CBCA has been running for 68 years, and is a not for profit organisation, run almost entirely by unpaid volunteers, many of whom are retired librarians.

It presents the Book of the Year awards, runs Children’s Book Week, organises all sorts of events promoting books to parents and kids, flies authors to remote and disadvantaged communities, and funds them to visit most towns and suburbs.

Perhaps CBCA too could open an office in Italy to promote Australian books to Europeans? It may, however, take quite a while as most of CBCA’s income is raised by holding cake stalls, raffles and film fund raisers.

The CBCA logo is blue and white but it is obvious they urgently need to change it to green and gold and hire a squad of scantily dressed cheerleaders.

Our rich history and traditions of storytelling will so easily be lost if these places and organisationswhich support children’s books and their writers are allowed to wither and die through paltry funding.

For some reason, here in WA we have many of Australia’s brightest and best writers, the people who are keeping the tsunami of overseas culture at bay and fighting to keep Australia’s voices alive.

We need these writers. They are the only ones telling Australian stories, because no one else in the world is, or ever likely to. It saddens me that, with only a few exceptions among my colleagues, the overwhelming majority of WA authors exist on incomes in the region of the poverty line.

Putting it in perspective, some extremely badly behaved and often drug-addled footballers become the role models for our children. Even if they don’t set out to be role models, and many don’t want to be, they are paid more than handsomely for kicking a ball about every Saturday, so that is part of the price they have to pay, by behaving decently off the field.

But no matter how well they do that, they are not really enriching our culture and national identity.

I would much prefer our children look up to and admire the creators, the ones who actually produce something worthwhile and lasting. True role models are decent people who care about Australia’s future, and not just the final score on the scoreboard each weekend. They care about what’s happening to our land and our culture, and it is the writers, musicians and artists who tell our stories and help us look at ourselves as Australians, or in my case, obviously, un-Australians.

Politicians constantly complain that children’s literacy levels are down, and getting worse, but the creators of children’s literature don’t seem to be particularly valued by those who allocate government funds. When we hear of a billion dollars being spent on a brand new literature centre instead of a second sports stadium I may take the politicians’ complaints a bit more seriously.

In the meantime, Ms Local Member, stop moaning that our kids’ literacy levels are heading in the direction of those in third-world countries, and either do something serious about the funding , or enjoy your trip on the train to the new $900,000,000+ stadium for the few games of AFL with the family.

Your kids may not be capable of reading the program, but I’m sure they will still have a great time watching that Sherrin football fly back and forth for no logical reason that I can see.

West Australian author Norman Jorgensen has won numerous awards for his books for children and young adults, including the successful picture books In Flanders Fields, illustrated by Brian Harrison -Lever, and The Last Viking, illustrated by James Foley. He has also written several novels for teenagers, including A Fine Mess and the popular Jack’s Island, which is set on Rottnest Island during World War II.